An Investigation Into The Sequential Pattern In College Students' Listening Comprehension Strategy Use

It is widely acknowledged that listeners are active processors of information instead of passive receivers of oral stimuli. In order to achieve real comprehension, listeners have to focus on the selected aspects of aural information and construct meaning from the aural input by drawing upon their prior knowledge of the world and of the target language that are stored in their long-term memory (LTM). Due to the limitation of short-term memory (STM), listeners often resort to various listening comprehension strategies to help them make predictions, judgments and generalization to achieve comprehension and accomplish tasks. An awareness and deployment of effective listening comprehension strategies can help students capitalize on the language input they are receiving and achieve a greater success in language learning.Western EFL/ ESL listening comprehension strategy researches usually split in two branches: one is on the strategies used by foreign and second language learners; the other is on the training of strategies. The most important researchers in this field are Murphy, O'Malley, Vandergrift, Bacon, Finneman, Rost and Ross, etc. In the body of research on listening strategies, Western researchers have used a numerous assessment methods to determine strategy use among learners, such as oral interviews, questionnaires, observations, verbal report and diaries, etc. among them, verbal-report is recently regarded as an important source of insight into foreign/second language listening comprehension strategies.Listening comprehension strategy research is already under way in China. The respectable pioneers such as Wang Churning, Qi Luxia, Liu Shaolong etc. have made valuable contributions to it. But as a whole, compared with development in West, the researches and theses published in this field are not rich enough, not to mention the case study. What's more, the majority of the studies are about the influence ofstrategy use on listeners' performance as a whole, the using frequency of specific strategies is seldom investigated and as for the question whether there exists a systematic pattern in listeners' strategy use, it is still a blank. While in teaching practice, the reality is even more depressing. Because of China's foreign language setting, classroom is the most important source of listening input, yet most of the listening classes are conducted in a stereotyped fashion that is testing rather than teaching the students. The result is that teaching classes just provide more practice but fail to improve listeners' skill.The critical role of listening comprehension and listening comprehension strategies, the inadequacy of the present research and the low efficiency of present listening teaching make up sound reasons for this study to be done. In order to facilitate language professionals' understanding of language learners' use and belief about their listening comprehension strategy, especially to find out whether there is a sequential pattern in Chinese college students' listening comprehension strategy use, the following study was conducted.Totally sixty students from Shaanxi Normal University participated in the study. The experiment included two parts: questionnaire and verbal-report.The result of the questionnaire reveals that the subjects believe that vocabulary is the most important factor affecting their listening efficiency. In addition, general ability in English, ability to attend and concentrate, practice opportunity, ability to distinguish between main and supporting points and familiarity with topic are also regarded as salient factors. The findings from the questionnaire also demonstrate that the most frequently used listening comprehension strategies are as follows: problem-identification, inferencing, planning, directed attention, self-monitoring, grouping, elaboration and self-evaluation.By analyzing the verbal-report protocol, the author has found that there does exist a sequential pattern in the subjects' listening comprehension strategy use. Usually, the listeners first...